Groupware Zarafa goes Open Source

The Dutch company Zarafa turns its groupware of the same name to open source.

According to the company, the move will gain them market segments from competition MS Exchange. The groupware solution comes with an Ajax based webclient, touts support for Microsoft’s Outlook and is compatible with Microsoft interface Mapi and ActiveSync. The latter enables data synchronization with, for example, Windows Mobile, iPhones and Nokia’s Mail for Exchange. Zarafa places its groupware source code under the Affero GPL v3, a variation of the general Public License (GPL), specially conceived for network software.

In its own community area of the company website, Zarafa has published the server sources, the new interface (API) for web service Z- Merge, the Zarafa Gateway for IMAP, POP 3 and iCAL, the Zarafa Administration Console and Zarafa Webaccess. “A strong technology community has emerged in the past year, to which more than 1000 specialists and developers contribute on a weekly basis. In cooperation with the project Openmapi, compatibility with additional platforms will be available in the near future”, said Brian Joseph, CEO at Zarafa. He points to the team project with Wilken, Topalis and VIPcom AG. In the freshly founded open source project, the companies are working together on open source libraries for a Mapi–based interface.

The Zarafa software packet with documentation is ready for download on the company’s website.

The Open-Xchange and Zarafa groupware systems can tap into the APIs of Facebook, Twitter, and Xing, but you need different tactics for each service – keep in mind that the information yield is sometimes quite meager.